Labor issues? Hire a digital assistant to help

Labor issues? Hire a digital assistant to help

Farm managers face a major challenge in finding and keeping quality employees. Especially now, when travel bans prevent that workers can go to work on dairy farms. Ida, the digital assistant can save time on different aspects of the farm.

The work on the farm continues and currently, finding skilled labor can be even a bigger challenge as travel and social distance measures are in place in most countries due to COVID-19. And during these uncertain times, farmers might be less likely to employ hired hands.

Using all the tools available to dairy farmers is essential to survive this severe downturn. The use of technology is key to get things going, stay in control and to save time.

24/7 monitoring of the cows

Despite all the restrictions, the intelligent dairy farmer’s assistant Ida can still travel. Getting Ida on your farm means that you have an extra set of eyes in the barn to watch your cows – 24/7 – for heat and health issues. Ida does this in an unbiased and objective way. This way, quality of heat and health monitoring is guaranteed, even in times when you might have less employees on the farm than you normally have.

Daniel Metzlar, owner 220 dairy farm in the Netherlands explains: “As a farmer or herd manager you’re not physically in the barn 24/7. But Ida is. Every minute of the day it zooms in on every single cow. You can take action before you can physically see the problem yourself. The cows stay healthier and this saves time and I can spend more time at home with my family”.

How can Ida help save time?

Ida saves time spend on checking the cows in the morning. This is because Ida also monitors the cows at night and sends an update to the farmer in the morning.

Use Ida as an alternative for tail painting and hence save many hours per week.

Let Ida do the visual heat detection for you. Replacing visual heat monitoring with automatic detection can save a lot of time per day. In addition, accuracy of the heat detection is improved.

Ida spots early signs of sickness, up to 2 days before a human eye can.
This means you can spend less time on a sick cow (treatment time) to
get her quickly back in production.

Alternative for labor intensive tail painting

Alex Neuenschwander runs a 1,100 dairy farm in the US agrees that it is hard to find skilled labour to work on large dairy operations in the US. He started with Ida on 2018 and sees the benefits, also on saving labor. “The heat detection capabilities of Ida is running really well. This is why I decided to quit tail painting, a common method on US dairy farms to mark cows in heat. By using Ida, catching cows in heat is much faster and accurate now. Not having to tail paint the cows anymore saves a lot of time for my staff”, he explains.

About Ida

Ida is the first digital assistant for the dairy farmer, based on sensor technology, cloud computing and machine learning. Ida translates unique data on cow behavior into accurate and actionable insights. This makes farming more efficient improves animal health. The technology has been developed by Connecterra and is available in 16 countries, including the US and Canada. Ask for a free demo here.